Sunday, June 17, 2018

Every time my grammar column calls attention to grammatical
infractions by members of Nigeria’s political class—from former President
Goodluck Jonathan to Patience Jonathan, from ministers to governors, and from
Aisha Buhari to President Muhammadu Buhari— I almost always get the same
predictably familiar, knee-jerk reactions from their minions. No one seems to
care when the grammatical errors of everyday people are called out.In fact, bewailing the fall in the quality of
English among secondary school students and undergraduates is a national
pastime.

But when the political elite write worse English than the
everyday people we delight in pillorying and someone highlights this fact,
suddenly a ragbag of hackneyed defenses is invoked such as, “na English we go
chop”; English is not our mother tongue; proficiency in English is not a
substitute for intelligence; Koreans, Japanese, and Chinese people don’t speak
English yet they are developed; insisting on proper English grammar is “colonial
mentality”; so long as the message is understood, grammatical correctness is
irrelevant; and so on.

I have responded to six of these escapist reactions. People
who have followed this column regularly will find some of what I write here
familiar.

1. “Na Grammar We Go
Chop?”

When people say “na grammar we go chop?” [will grammar bring
food to the table?] they are being disingenuous because the reverse is also valid:
“na bad grammar we go chop?” The truth is that neither good grammar nor bad
grammar from leaders brings food to the table, which makes the whole talk about grammar's gastronomic utility silly and unproductive. Knowledge of good grammar shows evidence of learning.
Atrocious grammar, at best, betrays poor learning. That’s nothing to be proud
of.

Perhaps the grammar-nescient crowd should unite and compel
the National Assembly to pass legislation that will make inability to speak
good English the new criterion to ascend to leadership in Nigeria. Maybe that
is what will bring food to the table.

2. English is Not Our
Mother Tongue

Of course it’s not, but it’s precisely because it’s not our
mother tongue that its mastery shows evidence of cognitive agility. But how
many Nigerians can write or speak their mother tongues proficiently? How many
of them can expound high-minded thoughts in their native languages? In an
August 26, 2012 article titled “The English Nigerian Children Speak,” I pointed
out that we are raising a generation of Nigerians whose first and only language
is a deformed, ghettoized, and impoverished form of English that is
incomprehensible to other members of the Anglophone world.

“But our proficiency in these multiple languages is
gradually deteriorating. Except for Hausa and, to some extent, Yoruba, all
Nigerian languages are endangered because of a lack of language loyalty, an
incompetent mastery of the rules of the languages, and the tendency toward what
linguists call code-mixing and code-switching, that is, an inelegant admixture
of English and our native languages.

“The desire to speak English is often blamed for the pitiful
state of our native languages, except that our mastery of English, on whose
behalf we devalue our native languages, is also so awful that other speakers of
the language can’t help but notice. (Any form of English that is unintelligible
to the rest of the English-speaking world is useless.)And Pidgin English, the other major
‘language’ we speak, is an anarchic, linguistically deficient language that not
only has limited utility outside Nigeria, but that is incapable of being the
medium for serious scholarly inquiry and global communication.”

3. English Mastery
Isn’t Synonymous with Intelligence

First, correcting bad grammar isn’t the same thing as
implying that people who speak or write bad grammar aren’t intelligent. But
several studies have shown a correlation between mastery of grammar and
intelligence. P.M. Symonds’ 1931 study titled “Practice Versus Grammar in the Learning of Correct English Usage” is one of the first systematic scholarly
inquiries into the relationship between aptitude for grammar and high IQ. The
study found that people with a high IQ grasped grammatical concepts faster than
those with a low IQ. Richard A. Meade’s
1961 study titled, “Who Can Learn Grammar?” also found a correlation between
superior intelligence and mastery of grammar. Several contemporary studies have
affirmed these findings.

But it is also true that there are highly intelligent people
who have no mastery of grammar, not because they can’t but because they invest
their intellectual energies elsewhere.

4. Koreans, Japanese,
Chinese Don’t Speak English

That’s a dumb argument. Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, etc.
don’t speak English because they weren’t colonized by English-speaking people. English
isn’t their official language. English isn’t the language of instruction at all
levels of their education. It isn’t the language of their courts. Nor is it the
language of their mass media. So there is no expectation that they should be
proficient in English. But English is Nigeria’s official language. It is the
language of education, of government, of the courts, of the dominant mass
media, etc. in Nigeria. That means there
is an expectation that an educated Nigerian should be proficient in English. Citing
the examples of Korea, Japan, etc. to justify poor mastery of English by a Nigerian
is a notoriously imperfect and intellectually fraudulent contrast of contexts.

Grammarians in Korea, Japan, China, etc. also take their
leaders and everyday people to task on correct usage in their native languages.
For as long as English remains the official language of Nigeria, it will always
be fair game to call attention to the grammatical bloopers committed by users
of the language. This also happens in countries where English is a native
language. Donald Trump—and before him George Bush—is habitually pilloried in
the media for his incorrect grammar.

Should we decide to adopt, say, Ogoni as our official
language, and the language becomes the language of instruction at all levels of
our education, like English is now, then language enthusiasts would be
justified to use the rules of Ogoni grammar to call out grammatical lapses.

In Nigeria, you can't proceed to institutions of higher
education if you don't have a credit in English—even if you want to study
mathematics or, for that matter, a Nigerian language! Yet minions of
politicians don’t want anyone to point out grammatical errors in official
communication, errors that would earn students a failing grade in their exams
if they were to commit them. That’s hypocritical. Plus, this is a grammar column,
not a general-interest column.

5. English Grammar is
“Colonial Mentality”

Nigerians who dismiss mastery of English as evidence of
“colonial mentality” lack self-reflexivity. The very name of our country,
Nigeria, was handed to us by English colonialists, and it’s derived from
English. More than 50 years after independence, we are still stuck with it. And
people talk of English being a holdover of colonialism?

Well, English is now, for all practical purposes, the
world’s lingua franca. Proficiency in it opens a world of opportunities. It is
a ladder to upward social mobility and is the vastest repository of the world’s
knowledge. As of this month, more than 50 percent of all content on the
Internet is written in English. The next “rival” to English is German with 6.3
percent. Russian is 6.2 percent. Arabic is 0.6 percent.

Similarly, the majority of the world’s scholarly and
scientific papers are written in English. That’s why universities in Europe and
Asia are increasingly switching to English as their language of instruction.
One German university president said English has become so central to global
knowledge production and circulation that for scholars who are non-native
English speakers, there are now only two options: either publish in English or
perish in your native tongue. That’s why proficiency in English is now
mandatory for South Korean academics. They can’t be tenured, i.e., be given
permanent employment, if they don’t demonstrate sufficient proficiency in
English grammar. So there goes number 4.

In the contemporary world, you shut out English at your own
expense. It is hard-nosed pragmatism to embrace its epistemic resources both
for development and for subversion.

Most importantly, though, as I’ve argued several times, the truth
is that English is the linguistic glue that holds our disparate, unnaturally
evolved nation together. Although Nigeria has three dominant languages, it also
has more than 400 mutually unintelligible languages. And given the perpetual
battles of supremacy between the three major languages in Nigeria—indeed among
all of Nigeria’s languages—it is impossible to impose any native language as a
national language. So, in more ways than one, English is crucial to Nigeria's
survival as a nation. Without it, it will disintegrate.

6. Message, not Grammar?

Does clarity of meaning trump grammatical correctness?
Maybe. But that may be true only where poor grammar doesn’t interfere with meaning
itself. For instance, in Buhari’s June 12 letter, he used “distract” when he
actually meant “detract.” That’s an example of an eye-catching grammatical
error that can distract the reader and detract from the message!

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About Me

Dr. Farooq Kperogi is a professor, journalist, newspaper columnist, author, and blogger based in Greater Atlanta, USA. He received his Ph.D. in communication from Georgia State University's Department of Communication where he taught journalism for 5 years and won the top Ph.D. student prize called the "Outstanding Academic Achievement in Graduate Studies Award." He earned his Master of Science degree in communication (with a minor in English) from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and won the Outstanding Master's Student in Communication Award. He earned his B.A. in Mass Communication (with minors in English and Political Science) from Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria, where he won the Nigerian Television Authority Prize for the Best Graduating Student. He writes a weekly column for the Nigerian Tribune. His research has won top awards. Read more about him here: https://www.farooqkperogi.com/p/about-me.html